As policy makers, election officials, and the public consider whether New York should change the way in which voters are allowed to register to participate in elections, and bring New York State election law into compliance with the Help America Vote Act, we provide an analysis of the potential impact of election dar registration (EDR) in New York. The current system of registration is one in which citizens must register 25 days before election day in order to be eligible to vote. Under EDR this advance registration barrier would be eliminated as citizens could register on election day.

Computers are important in every aspect of modern life. Automative tabulating machines are designed to be the most consistent and reliable counting approach invented. Still, questions of reliability, security and auditability persist. Ken Thompson and others have shown that, like other carelessly composed processes, computer programs can harbor potentially criminal activity. To be useful for voting, software must simplify and improve the ability to record and report intentions.

Reading disabled (RD) voters represent approximately 1 in 7 voters. Current electronic voting technologies exhibit substantially different error rates between RD voters and non-RD voters. These error rates are not consistent. For example, full-faced voting systems are better suited for RD individuals, while page-by-page systems are better for non-RD voters. We seek to analyze the differences in the voter’s performance in order to build interfaces that reduce mistakes and errors for both RD and non-RD voters.

We recommend four immediate steps that the Election Assistance Commision (EAC) should take to improve the electoral process for the November 2004 presidential election. We also provide below a number of other steps that we believe are necessary for avoiding lost votes in the presidential election this fall. However, as time and resources are limited, we recognize that these additional steps might be difficult to achieve nationwide by November.

The collection of detailed election administration data from local and state jurisdictions across the United States has proven difficult. The problem is partly due to the decentralized nature of election administration in the United States but is exacerbated by the lack of a centralized reporting of election information. Following calls made for better reporting of election administration data in recent years from many groups, including the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, the U.S.

This study examines current attitudes of the American electorate toward electronic voting. This issue is critical to understand, given the highly argumentative debate going on among media and political elites on this topic, as well as the movement in many states and localities toward electronic voting systems. If American voters lack confidence in electronic voting systems--or for that matter all the various voting systems they may use in this fall's presidential election--the basic integrity of our democratic system could be in jeopardy.

The voter registration list is the information backbone for the administration of elections. Keeping it up-to-date is a difficult task that can expose officials to accusations of voter disenfranchisement. We review here some of the problems that affected Florida elections, explore some solutions proposed with the Help America Vote Act of 2002 in regards to voter registration maintenance, and illustrate these with an experiment on the actual voter rolls from Florida.